Actually you can easily ignore a game like Skyrim. Especially since the core design philosophy behind DA is completely different from TES. I'll take a more narrow slice of 'content' with more carefully designed gameplay over 'here, have a shitload of mediocre randomness.'

Unless your owner says your game must sell a bazillion copies, so make it like Skyrim,' there's no reason to homogenize.

Also, Skyrim wasn't a new direction. Unless you count selling way more than its predecessors despite being the same basic game' as a new direction. Which is exactly what he's saying, in PR speak.

Excluding Arena, the Elder Scrolls games have never been mediocre. There's no need to be dismissive of Bethesda's achievements just because of a wayward comment made by a Bioware dev.

Actually you can easily ignore a game like Skyrim. Especially since the core design philosophy behind DA is completely different from TES. I'll take a more narrow slice of 'content' with more carefully designed gameplay over 'here, have a shitload of mediocre randomness.'

Unless your owner says your game must sell a bazillion copies, so make it like Skyrim,' there's no reason to homogenize.

Also, Skyrim wasn't a new direction. Unless you count selling way more than its predecessors despite being the same basic game' as a new direction. Which is exactly what he's saying, in PR speak.

Excluding Arena, the Elder Scrolls games have never been mediocre. There's no need to be dismissive of Bethesda's achievements just because of a wayward comment made by a Bioware dev.

Quest design usually isn't as good as Bioware stuff, though it IS strong and certainly better than, say, gather 10 wolf pelts and report back. Though the random quests were literally "mediocre randomness" and it's foolish to say otherwise, not that anyone should've expected better. And frequently dungeon design comes off the same as randomly generated, especially in Oblivion (what was it, one or two level designers? What the christ)

Maybe it's just showing more, but it is alarming how eager the industry seems to have become of the "follow the leader" mentality, it seemed before if you did your own thing you could just keep on doing that if it was successful even if others were markedly different, but now it really does sound like they want to go for homogenization. Who knows though, maybe they'll instead just make it essentially the same but dumping traditional hubs, especially goof if the world design is more Dragon's Dogma/Dark Souls than Skyrim, a small, deliberately designed area versus just creating empty sprawling wilderness with a bunch of junk littering the place.

Actually you can easily ignore a game like Skyrim. Especially since the core design philosophy behind DA is completely different from TES. I'll take a more narrow slice of 'content' with more carefully designed gameplay over 'here, have a shitload of mediocre randomness.'

Unless your owner says your game must sell a bazillion copies, so make it like Skyrim,' there's no reason to homogenize.

Also, Skyrim wasn't a new direction. Unless you count selling way more than its predecessors despite being the same basic game' as a new direction. Which is exactly what he's saying, in PR speak.

Excluding Arena, the Elder Scrolls games have never been mediocre. There's no need to be dismissive of Bethesda's achievements just because of a wayward comment made by a Bioware dev.

Quest design usually isn't as good as Bioware stuff, though it IS strong and certainly better than, say, gather 10 wolf pelts and report back. Though the random quests were literally "mediocre randomness" and it's foolish to say otherwise, not that anyone should've expected better. And frequently dungeon design comes off the same as randomly generated, especially in Oblivion (what was it, one or two level designers? What the christ)

Maybe it's just showing more, but it is alarming how eager the industry seems to have become of the "follow the leader" mentality, it seemed before if you did your own thing you could just keep on doing that if it was successful even if others were markedly different, but now it really does sound like they want to go for homogenization. Who knows though, maybe they'll instead just make it essentially the same but dumping traditional hubs, especially goof if the world design is more Dragon's Dogma/Dark Souls than Skyrim, a small, deliberately designed area versus just creating empty sprawling wilderness with a bunch of junk littering the place.

The games industry has been, and always will be, iterative. Every game, regardless of your opinion of it, has been heavily influenced by past games because major developers need to produce quality titles if they want the public to fund their endeavors and continue making games. The real issue is that Bioware is held to such a pretentiously high pedigree (disregarding their multiple and blatant forays into camp territory) that the idea of emulating a similarly huge role playing game company like Bethesda is seen as an insult to some fans.

The truth of the matter is that Bethesda has been equally fastidious in their lore and story development, but the size and scope of their worlds doesn't afford them enough time or resources to create the addictive branching social interactions that Bioware is famous for. They're still crafting innovative, original, lore-steeped worlds and their power to immerse players in a high fantasy setting is practically unmatched. While I'm completely against Bioware's attempt to emulate a Bethesda title, to pretend that Bethesda employs less effort in their individual environments and setting comes across as a misinformed allegation. The locations, characters, and pantheons of gods you discover in the ES series all have a history and reason for existing. They aren't as random as some would have you believe.

The games industry has been, and always will be, iterative. Every game, regardless of your opinion of it, has been heavily influenced by past games because major developers need to produce quality titles if they want the public to fund their endeavors and continue making games. The real issue is that Bioware is held to such a pretentiously high pedigree (disregarding their multiple and blatant forays into camp territory) that the idea of emulating a similarly huge role playing game company like Bethesda is seen as an insult to some fans.

The thing is this isn't, say, Witcher showing a similar take to Bioware that should be paid attention to, this is of a very different breed of RPG, more like the difference between Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest and Zelda. You'd get some backlash to the former (though the series is malleable enough that you might be able to get away with something on a lighter level), and the latter would be VERY severe if DQIX's any indication. Granted, a huge part of the problem here is we don't even really know what "inpsiration" means here: are they making it open world, and if so to what degree? Full blown action RPG (I am expecting that)? There's always something you could take from another, completely unrelated game and integrate into your series without fundamentally altering it, you could easily put Zelda-esque tools in an FF to make it a bit more interesting rather than making it a Zelda clone for example.

The truth of the matter is that Bethesda has been equally fastidious in their lore and story development, but the size and scope of their worlds doesn't afford them enough time or resources to create the addictive branching social interactions that Bioware is famous for. They're still crafting innovative, original, lore-steeped worlds and their power to immerse players in a high fantasy setting is practically unmatched. While I'm completely against Bioware's attempt to emulate a Bethesda title, to pretend that Bethesda employs less effort in their individual environments and setting comes across as a misinformed allegation. The locations, characters, and pantheons of gods you discover in the ES series all have a history and reason for existing. They aren't as random as some would have you believe.

That's not really what I and I presume Stephen meant: more like every dungeon comes off a remix of another (especially in Oblivion), and that Skyrim literally introduced randomly generated quests where you either got told to do some errand or had a guy drop something on you then run off (and to further add to the randomness there, I actually had a dragon attack happen just after that happened once). Granted, I did mention I thought Bioware did better quests, but that's not the same as saying the actual designed quests came off as random.

EDIT: Although on second thought, it really might be preferable for FF to go heavily Zelda inspired. FF's taking its notes from Half Life, Call of Duty, and Uncharted, and not only is that actually a more extreme version of what people are fearing here but their design MO is in direct contrast with what I find appealing about RPGs. Of course, these guys really want to play up the cinematic angle, though it does seem like it may've collapsed on itself after XIII.

I'm not quite sure what you're arguing at this point. The poster before you referred to Skyrim as "a shitload of mediocre randomness", so I was responding to that.

As far as the radiant questing system is concerned, I'm not sure I get your complaint. It's as you said a system employed to randomly generate additional quests for the player, and is only used in the context of bounties, guild assignments, and I think crafting orders, so you always know when you're getting them. It's not like they're a major part of Skyrim or anything.

I'm not quite sure what you're arguing at this point. The poster before you referred to Skyrim as "a shitload of mediocre randomness", so I was responding to that.

I got a bit off track I guess, especially since I guess we don't really disagree that Bioware trying to be Bethesda would be a bad thing, but I think what he was getting at was that Elder Scrolls employs more of a quantity over quality approach to game design, many samey dungeons at the expense of a few, tightly designed ones. Not that Bioware's been the best there though, especially lately as DAII went further than Elder Scrolls did (using the same exact dungeons rather than the same set of assets) from what I heard and is still a fairly short game, and ME1 was straight up copy pasting the side ones and probably literally randomly generated the planets, though all the main quest stuff remained distinct at least.

By being more Skyrim like they mean having a more open world than the series of "tunnels" that Dragon Age Origins areas were. Bioware has said on its forums they are not planning on making Dragon Age into a sandbox game in anyway shape or form.

It other words, think of it as the difference between Demon Soul's Maps and Dark Soul's Open World. Dark Soul in no way turned into a sand box game but I do feel the level design was a lot better thanks to it being an open world. It gave that sense of "hey, thats where I have been or will be going next off in the distance" feeling which added to the epicness of the journey you travel in game.

By being more Skyrim like they mean having a more open world than the series of "tunnels" that Dragon Age Origins areas were. Bioware has said on its forums they are not planning on making Dragon Age into a sandbox game in anyway shape or form.

It other words, think of it as the difference between Demon Soul's Maps and Dark Soul's Open World. Dark Soul in no way turned into a sand box game but I do feel the level design was a lot better thanks to it being an open world. It gave that sense of "hey, thats where I have been or will be going next off in the distance" feeling which added to the epicness of the journey you travel in game.

Yeah, what he said was alarming but realistically it PROBABLY meant something more like that, which I'd welcome. Though it's still weird to say that's a "New direction" when if anything it seems design along those lines was more popular and established before the idea of hubs and selecting your disconnected destination on a map.

I can appreciate the opposite opinion of mine, but I believe that Bethesda employs 'quantity over quality.' Building a giant world with lore is certainly an achievement, but I've never felt like Bethesda's TES games are that compelling. The repetitive dungeons and sort of meaningless feeling to everything really cut my enjoyment short. I can usually get some hours out of the joy of exploration and finding stuff, but eventually the seams start to show and I start to feel as if everything has been assembly-lined.

I don't think Bioware is perfect either, but I was more commenting on the fact that any increase in similarity between DA and TES going forward is because Skyrim sold like pre-buttered pancakes and EA took notice, not out of some "brilliant spark of ingenuity."

And when it's for THAT reason there's less chance of any changes/new additions really being a novel spin that works great for that game, but just feels like cribbing a popular element. We'll see I guess.